Cyprus crisis a symptom of what is rotten in EU

Cyprus cannot repay its debt and the EU cannot go on throwing money at it. The banking system needs a radical overhaul

By Slavoj Zizek / The Guardian

This is why the solution is not just more regulation to prevent money laundering and so on, but a radical change in the entire banking system — to say the unsayable, some kind of socialization of the banks. The lesson of the worldwide crashes after 2008 is clear: The whole network of financial funds and transactions, from individual deposits and retirement funds to the functioning of all kinds of derivatives, will have to be somehow put under social control, streamlined and regulated. This may sound utopian, but the true utopia is the notion that we can somehow survive with only cosmetic changes.

Slavoj Zizek is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in London.